To some extent this is a financial problem, since most anthropologists need to use the resources of universities in order to do their fieldwork and writing at all–and having access to those resources ultimately requires the anthropologist to publish in scholarly contexts.

What I mean is that I often hear (and say) “you didn’t understand what I said/meant” when someone else does not come to the same political conclusion based on the data/story told. Perhaps this is because we find it hard to believe that people, having fully understood what we have said, would come to a different analysis and conclusion. And since my work is about politics and government, this often shows up as a tension between what people in my research site see as the cause/solution to problems like insecurity and poverty versus what I see.

Will I upset some people when I write my dissertation? Probably. Will they say “she’s wrong because she just doesn’t get it, she didn’t understand what she was seeing, she talked and listened to the wrong people”? Probably.

And are some of the people who I’ll upset not the sorts of people who anthropologists typically upset when they write politically controversial stuff? Most likely.

I would suggest that your wife should have an ethical concern with documenting the provenance of anything she collects. You might try asking some folklorists these same questions. In my experience your average folklorist is more likely to have articulated such questions to themselves (http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED126543&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED126543)

Life in Indian wards was very different. In that Christian mission hospital, patients were allowed to see visitors often and to rely on their escorts for meals that were suitable to their particular religious and personal requirements (rather than being forced or expected to eat food made in the hospital kitchen). Patients’ families were not exiled from the Indian hospital as they were in the USA, in those days (the ’60s). I wanted Indian readers of my book–written in English since that was the language of anthropological publishing there–to see that there was no need to deplore their ways of delivering health care in hospitals by comparison with the social anthropology of “our” institutions that was on offer at that time. An unintended consequence of publishing my book in India was that it started the field of medical sociology as a university specialty in India.

There were places that I realised I could not go in interviewing patients: family income, marital problems (unless the patient talked about them on her own), and even the number of children (talk about which was a cause of anxiety over the evil eye among some of the patients). I had ways of estimating or even finding out number of children because someone, probably a husband, had already given that information on the hospital intake interview. There’s much more about the issue of publishing one’s analysis locally, reader reception, etc., but I think I’ve spoken sufficiently to this thread from my own experience.

The thing I want to get to here, though, is that when I write I’m generally engaged in something which I can at least to some extent conceive of as being for (on behalf of) Lahu people. Is that conception of mine potentially offensive, though? How to I avoid, or do I need to avoid, the apparently dominant position I place myself in? To draw on John’s analogy, should(n’t) I place (some? known? my contacts among?) Lahu in a position of responding to me: “Hey, don’t you psychoanalyze me!”

If, however, the people you are working with remain offended, you have a choice to make. You can say what you believe and accept the consequences or filter what you believe to fit what they want you to say. In journalism that’s called selling out. In a courtroom it’s called perjury.

If, however, the people you are working with remain offended, you have a choice to make. You can say what you believe and accept the consequences or filter what you believe to fit what they want you to say. In journalism that’s called selling out. In a courtroom it’s called perjury.

This post touches on a few questions I’m wrestling with as I’m on the field. Putting aside the issue of indecipherable jargon, what do I do when I’m asked by the people I’m working with what I think about a situation in their country and they disagree with my opinion? This isn’t a question of being understood or misinterpreted. On the one hand, there’s a strong value in having our work be identifiable to the people in it (i.e., that they feel known and faithfully depicted in our writing). On the other hand, at what point does this value conflict with our own intellectual integrity. As I am “studying up,” my interlocutors seem more familiar with the intellectual conventions I’m working under. That “understanding” doesn’t mean that they like or agree with what I’m saying, though.

The tenor of the post and the comments seems to assume (correctly, in my situation) that the projects we’re writing about take place somewhere other than “home.” What about those of us who are doing work in the United States (i.e., my home)? Those of us who are working in cities, in settings of rural poverty in the US? What about those of us who are doing work among communities whose political beliefs we might strongly disagree with (e.g., the religious right in the US)? How do the ethics of intelligibility, correspondence, and, well, “do I agree with this assessment or not” touch down here?

Sally, having swallowed cheese,
Directs down holes the scented breeze
Enticing thus, with baited breath,
Nice mice to an untimely death

‘The possibility I would like to raise here is that those who write opaque left theory might very well feel that they are… writing to a public that does not yet exist, and finding that their language can circulate only in channels hostile to it, they write in a manner designed to be a placeholder for a future public.’ (pg. 130)

In other words, writing clearly and making one’s work accessible are not necessarily analogous operations. It depends who’s your public – and where you would like your work to have political effect.